Dell flirts with the Linux desktop

Is Dell is on its way to becoming the first tier-one PC vendor to offer a mainstream business Linux desktop to US customers? It's starting to look that way.

In the recent past, Dell has toyed with shipping a Linux-powered PC to the US market. But, when push came to shove, the results -- a Dimension E510n PC shipped with an empty hard drive, a copy of the obscure, open-source FreeDOS operating system and no support if you did install Linux -- were less then impressive.

It's a different story for so-called workstations priced nearly as cheaply as desktops. Dell has started advertising a trio of affordable workstations with RHEL WS 4 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation 4) preinstalled.